THE NEW YORKER fifties there were bouts every two years or so during which Laughlin, who had by now relocated the busi- ness to New York, refused to see him. He said recently, "It was because whenever I saw Delmore, he would scream at me. You could hear him across Sixth Avenue. Then one day he came into the office with a sick old alley cat and tied its leg to my type- writer with a piece of string. He was going on about how Nelson Rocke- feller and I had seduced his second wife, Elizabeth. That's how crazy he was." "Didn't it bother you?" "I got used to it. I am used to it. All of them do it. But if an author was terribly difficult I just dropped him. I tended to want people to do just what I wanted and how I wanted to do things. Berryman had a terrible line about me-I was messy, but I wasn't 'horrible.' I just couldn't stand Berry- man. He was so preposterous and sly d " an arrogant. "But wasn't Schwartz difficult?" I asked. "Yes, but I loved Delmore. And even from Delmore's letters it's clear he wasn't going to another publisher. The critics were saying about New Directions, 'This is literature, this is real,' and the writers wanted to be in on that." Laughlin smiled. "I've al- ways gotten good advice. Delmore charged a dollar a year for his. It was Ezra who put me on to Marianne Moore. Ezra loved her and admired her, and I don't think he ever stifled her. She was all tied up, so we didn't publish her, but I admired her won- derful choice of décor-animal, veg- etable, and mineral. I'm sure she mentioned Elizabeth Bishop, which is how we got her In the Annual, but Bishop didn't want to be in one of our five-poet anthologies-something I suggested when she said she didn't have enough work. Quite rightly, she wanted to stand on her own. She and Beckett are the two I'm sorry about. Grove published him. It kept them going for years. Imagine all the people who have to read 'Godot.' I wish I'd got Seamus Heaney, too. I think he's marvellous. Bill Williams encouraged the Beats, but he encouraged every- body. I didn't have a crystal ball. It was Mark Van Doren who passed Merton along to us. Giroux published most of his work, but we published all his poetry, even though I thought it was a little schmalzy-Catholic." Laughlin often went down to the Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, to visit Merton (The visits were allowed because the books brought money into the monastery coffers.) "I've always thought, If you can't be a writer, at least you can be around writers. The abbot let me hire a car and drive Merton around," Laughlin said, with the relish he usually reserves for ski stories. "We'd get started off, and Merton would have been up since God knows when. He never tried to convert me. He'd say, 'Don't pay any attention to those guys and their singing.' Once we got a mile or so down the road, he'd bolt into the woods and change into his overalls. W e' d stop at four or five bars in an afternoon. There .was a move- ment at the monastery to make him an abbot, but Tom didn't want to be an abbot. He got a poster up: 'TV in every room! Baseball every afternoon!' I've . h h " got it ere somew ere. Laughlin peered with mild curiosity at a spot on the ceiling, and then said, "He always wanted to be ecumenical. Some of his friends got up a little fund so he could go to Asia. All his life, he 55 was trying to have a mystical experi- ence-he was trying for it at the monastery-and he finally had it in Ceylon, with the huge sleeping Bud- dhas at Polonnaruwa." Merton died in Asia. A small suit- case came back on the plane with his body. It was marked 'For James Laughlin,' and inside were Merton's diaries, which Laughlin helped edit for publication. The work took him two years, mainly because all the theo- logical references had to be checked. "It sold all right," he says. "Two or three thousand copies." Laughlin's expectations of the book- buying public were never high; when a book did do well, he was often astonished. In a letter to Delmore Schwartz, he explained that as soon as he started to count on making money from New Directions books, he would "drift into printing crap." In another letter, sent in 1938 to Dylan Thomas, two years before New Directions pub- lished "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," he wrote, "Ordinarily a good book of stories by a newcomer would do between three and five hundred in America. But, if as I imagine is the From beginning @ 1991 AmerICan Honda Motor Co., Inc. T --.......